Month: August 2008

The Killer Inside We

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy

In Esquire, Stephen Marche neatly connects our current obsession with violence to the bloodiness of Cormac McCarthy‘s novels. Marche’s evidence mainly sticks to Grand Theft Auto and mixed martial arts, but no matter, it’s still a good excuse to get a good quote in:

I hear my mother asking, “Why must our paradises be so violent?” Cormac McCarthy has an answer. From “Blood Meridian,” McCarthy’s masterpiece: “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. . . . That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.” We can choose to sublimate violence through sports or confront it through fiction or turn it into comedy through video games. Violence remains. Always.

Taking a tone that’s a little less up-in-arms, my Washington City Paper colleague Brent Burton wrote a fine piece a while back about metal musicians’ embrace of McCarthy’s corpus:

When asked why McCarthy makes such a strong impression on headbangers—especially those who eschew vocals—Dahlquist suggests that imagery might be just as important as structure. “If I get something in my head,” he says, “maybe someone else will, as well.” Dylan Carlson, the man behind drone-metal act Earth, a band that once featured Kurt Cobain, would no doubt agree. Sidelined for years by drugs—O’Malley claims Carlson “cheated death,” just like a character in a McCarthy novel—Carlson reemerged in late 2005 with the all-instrumental Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method, an album based on—you guessed it—Blood Meridian. “[T]his book was the strongest invocation of the real American West I had ever encountered outside of a straight historical text,” Carlson said in an interview with British webzine Metal Chaos.

A Drinking Life

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ethan Canin

Seattle’s new Words & Wine series still has a few kinks to work out, says Paul Constant, reporting on its Ethan Canin event in the Stranger: “Canin’s new novel is America America, so someone had decided that the thing to play was Neil Diamond’s ‘America.'” But cocktails do open an author up:

He talked at length about his career as a doctor, mentioning, for example, that “the only time I ever got sued” was a result of attempting to treat a gunshot victim, adding cryptically that “finding an entry wound is much harder than finding the exit wound.” He told aspiring authors to relax and let the subtext of their books remain in the unconscious and not to overanalyze: “Symbols are not symbols because Harold Bloom says they’re symbols.” He reflected on the positive side of America’s possible impending demise as a global superpower. It might be true that we won’t be the wealthiest people in the world, but on the other hand, “it could be a good thing. Italians don’t have to worry about their place in the world anymore, and they seem pretty relaxed.”

If Timmy Doesn’t Get His Finger Paints, the Terrorists Win

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Michael Chabon

Art increases the sense of our common humanity. The imagination of the artist is, therefore, a profoundly moral imagination: the easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes, the more difficult it then becomes to do that person harm. If you want to make a torturer, first kill his imagination. If you want to create a nation that will stand by and allow torture to be practiced in its name, then go ahead and kill its imagination, too. You could start by cutting school funding for art, music, creative writing and the performing arts.

— From Michael Chabon‘s introduction (PDF) to Barack Obama‘s arts policy statement (PDF). Apologies to those for whom this is old news. It’s only just now hit my radar. (via)

Elkin’s Early Days

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bernard Malamud, Stanley Elkin

Writing in Nextbook, Sarah Almond takes a look at one of Stanley Elkin‘s lesser-known early novels, 1967’s A Bad Man. The novel, a surrealistic portrait of a half-Jewish man’s tenure in prison, has hint’s of Elkin’s own life in it (though he never did jail time). But the bigger influence may have been Bernard Malamud—as a sort of model of how not to write about Jewishness. Almond explains:

In the Spring 1967 issue of The Massachusetts Review, while still at work on A Bad Man, Elkin critiqued Malamud’s masterpiece [The Fixer] as “bringing about some telling stasis. . . . The Fixer is immensely moving, but this quality is at once its supreme achievement and part of its downfall.” Even Malamud’s most ardent supporters had noted the author’s frequent use of symbolism—in The Fixer as well as past works like The Assistant—to illustrate the moral implications of Jewishness. …. For Elkin, such allusions were too predictable. “It’s always seemed to me that the best kind of book is the open-ended book where anything can happen,” he later told Peter Bailey in an interview for Review of Contemporary Fiction. “I hate a book which has one premise and the writer sticks to that premise so tightly that . . . the reader has no room to breathe.”